So, Landscapes of the Mind may have closed on May 2, but as you can see we still have the brain on our mind.  Below are some thoughts from our Coordinator of Education Programs, Joann Harnden.

Brains are cool, no question. This holds true for visitors of all ages. It’s true for hesitant high school students who find themselves asking earnest questions about the brain despite their best intentions to remain aloof, and true for the seven and eight-year olds who come bounding in the front door, propelled forward by the promise of touching an actual brain on family day.

So why are we so fascinated by brains? Why do we have such strong reactions, both positive and negative?

Recent technology offers an unprecedented opportunity to see what millions of humans before us have not been able to see—a living brain and its activity. This phenomenon is at once discomforting, exciting, and provocative. We are seeing something that perhaps we feel we shouldn’t. The brain is vital to our existence, and yet, in an exposed state, it is so vulnerable. It is ironic that we use our brains to figure out how the world around us works, and yet the workings of our own brains remain unseen and unknown without the aid of technological equipment. It is no wonder that we crave the clues that scientific images can provide about the brain and its inner workings.

Provocative as the scientific images are, and as great as our curiosity is to see such images, in the end we are left with the question, does this really capture what the mind is, what the mind does, what the mind feels like? An MRI falls flat in comparison with the experience of actually having a thought. Scientific imaging of the brain reminds me of the traces of elusive animal life sought by the natural scientist. Animal tracks, scat, or even fossilized remains may provide valuable information to the scientist, and yet these bits of evidence cannot compare with witnessing a live animal in its habitat. The same is true for the brain. We have a deep-seated feeling that the mind is more than the sum of its parts, and I think the richness of intuitive and internally-driven artistic exploration in Landscapes of the Mind feeds our desire to understand the living brain.

Visitors sometimes ask “But what does it mean?” Perhaps they are interested in the artist’s intention. Or perhaps they are looking for a scientific key to decode the meaning of the artwork. Or maybe they don’t know exactly what they are looking for, but they desire a single, definitive narrative that tells us what the artwork means.

As a museum educator, what consistently inspires and energizes me is, in fact, the opposite of this desire for a single story of meaning. Everyday I am reminded of the amazing ability of the human mind to entertain and construct many different meaningful connections to a single piece of art. This is not something that only sophisticated museum-goers can do. It is not something that only complex or enigmatic works of art evoke. It is something that every human mind does every single day in response to all types of stimuli.

In The Artful Mind (Ed: Mark Turner, Oxford University Press, 2002), cognitive and semiotic theorist Per Aage Brandt describes the incredible ability of the human mind to “pay attention” or to hold multiple thoughts about an object or experience in our minds simultaneously, from the most concrete to the most abstract. This is a habit of mind that we try to encourage through our education programs at WCMA. In our tours, we encourage students to engage with art on multiple levels: describing concrete sensory observations, making comparisons, and articulating feelings and inferences. We emphasize group conversations as a way to develop a richer and more nuanced relationship with a work of art than any one of us could achieve alone. We hope that students come away from the experience feeling more at ease with the idea that there is no answer key to artwork, and to see that as exciting rather than intimidating. For me, that is what is so stimulating about the exhibition Landscapes of the Mind. It resists reducing the life of the mind to a single story. It celebrates the ability of our “multi-attentional” brains to develop richly layered and diverse interpretations of the life of the mind.

In this same spirit of conversation and multiple voices of interpretation, I would really love to hear from all of you who have visited the exhibition:

What kinds of experiences have you had in Landscapes of the Mind?

What interests you about the mind?

Did anything in the exhibition surprise you?

Did the exhibition make you think about the mind in a new way? Raise questions?

Has the exhibition inspired you to make artwork of your own?

Please post your thoughts!

Just in case you missed the inaugural event for the Fulkerson Fund for Leadership in the Arts on April 22, below are some YouTube videos documenting the event!

We hope you enjoy them!

Don’t miss the exhibition Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain. . .the last day to see the show is this Sunday, May 2. 

If you’ve (somehow!) missed all of the previous posts about this show, Landscapes of the Mind features the work of four contemporary artists—Susan Aldworth, Andrew Carnie, Jessica Rankin, and Katy Schimert—who blend the worlds of art and science.

Enjoy the warm weather this weekend and come to WCMA!  Open Tuesday through Saturday 10 am to 5 pm, and Sunday 1 pm to 5 pm. Wheelchair accessible. Free admission.

Above images:  Installation shots of Landscapes of the Mind by Arthur Evans.

In March, the Williams College Museum of Art held a symposium that brought together artists and neuroscientists for a day of talks and discussions as part of Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain.  It was during that time that one of the artists in the show, Susan Aldworth, visited us from her home in London.  Susan is an incredibly engaging person, a wonderful artist, and lots of fun.

One of the things that has stayed with me most about Susan’s series of Brainscape etchings and their corresponding Location Drawings are their close affinity to nature.  When I look at the Brainscapes I think of celestial imagery or early botanical drawings.  The most obvious visual references that are called to my mind are Anna Atkins’s (British, 1799-1871) cyanotypes, often called  ’sunprints.’  These images or ‘photogenic drawings’ are made, as the Getty Museum’s website explains:

“. . . by carefully placing the specimen onto a sheet of paper that had been made light-sensitive by a coating of a combination of chemicals. The resulting print is called a cyanotype because of the blue color produced by the chemicals. Securing the specimens to the paper with a sheet of glass, the glass and paper were then placed in the sun; after sufficient exposure to light, the paper was washed in water, which caused the image to appear in its final form. Because the specimens were solid objects that light could not pass through, they appear as negative images.”

The relationship between science and art here is key, as Atkins was trained as a botanist and developed an interest in photography as a means of recording botanical specimens for a scientific reference book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843).

The first image below is one of Aldworth’s Brainscapes; the second image below is a cyanotype by Atkins.

Not only is the bright blue indigo of Atkins’s cyanotype echoed in Aldworth’s Brainscape etching, but so is the fluidity and quality of line that Aldworth is able to achieve using a marker as a resist on the etching plate.  Aldworth has pioneered a ‘negative line’ etching technique to depict her interpretations of patients’ cerebral angiograms as portraits.  Atkins pioneered the cyanotype as an early form of photography, also using chemical processes to describe the ‘personality,’ as it were, of the specimens she recorded.

- Kathryn Price, Interim Associate Curator and co-curator of Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain

Above images: Susan Aldworth, Brainscape 17 and 11, 2006, etching and aquatint on paper, Collection of the artist.  Anna Atkins, Himanthalia lorea and Fucus ceranoides, cyanotypes, orignially published in British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843).

On April 8, the museum had a “Gam”! As Melville writes in Chapter 53 of Moby-Dick, the Gam is “A social meeting of two (or more) whale-ships generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boat’s crews…”

We invited faculty from Williams-Mystic program (a.k.a. “ship” from Mystic CT) to join faculty from Williams in English, Humanities, and Environmental Studies (“ship” from Williamstown MA) and to discuss different themes in the novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville and the sculpture Mocha Dick by Tristin Lowe.

James T. Carlton, Professor of Marine Sciences, Williams College, and Director, Williams-Mystic Program, answered our questions about the biology of whales, but acknowledged there is much we don’t know and that fascinates us still. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Associate Professor of English, University of Connecticut; Senior Lecturer in Literature of the Sea, Williams-Mystic Program, talked about Melville’s life, sources, and his writing process, as well as the burgeoning number of scholars working on this great novel. Glenn Gordinier, Robert G. Albion Historian, Williams-Mystic Program; Co-Director, The Munson Institute, Mystic Seaport, gave voice to sailors’ experiences in the whaling industry of the nineteenth century. Peter Erickson, Visiting Professor of Humanities, Williams College, discussed issues of “whiteness” as they appear in the “textile and the text” and considered Wolcott’s work as a foil. Williams S. Lynn, Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Williams College, discussed environmental ethics, the notion of who is part of a moral community, and “lifeboat ethics.” Shawn Rosenheim, Professor of English, Williams College, commented on issues of scale in the novel and what Melville’s reaction to this sculpture might be. In the background, the sounds of a sperm whale clicked. Thanks to the 75 members of the community for attending and participating in the discussion. We hope the discussion will continue!

As Melville writes in the Chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale”: “What the white whale was to Ahab has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.”

It is for each of us to look at the sculpture, and consider the whale and all the issues that come to the surface.

- Cynthia Way, Director of Education and Visitor Experience

“You can look INTO my brain but you will never find me.”
SUSAN ALDWORTH, 2006

I have been thinking a lot about the title of the exhibition Landscapes of the Mind. Contemporary neuroscience talks of “mapping the mind” — it aims to chart the neural infrastructure of the human mind. This knowledge is important for our understanding of what it is to be human. But whilst a map of the mind suggests the idea of a landscape if we are talking about minds in general, it changes into a kind of portraiture as soon as we consider the map or landscape of the mind of someone in particular. This artistic metaphor where landscape refers to the objective mapping of the mind and portraiture references the subjective SELF reflects the problems with scientific investigation into the nature of consciousness which is by definition a subjective experience.

This transition between landscape and portrait is reflected in my works in Landscapes of the Mind. Contemporary scanning technologies mean that the human brain is visually permeable as never before. We can watch our own brains functioning live on a monitor and visualize various forms of activity in the brain. But what is a brain scan? Brain scans are precise scientific photographs but they are incomplete records of an individual. They seem to promise to disclose something of our very essence as people as they open our minds for visual inspection. But they disappoint on this front on their own. They are inherently reductionist – breaking down the self into its component parts without offering an explanation of the whole. They offer a landscape of the mind when it is a portrait that we want.

I am fascinated by the ambiguity of brain scans: the gap between what they do show (the physical structure and function of the brain) and what they don’t – the SELF. Brain scans have a specific meaning within a medical and scientific context, but their meaning changes at the moment we consider them as images of an individual person, that is, once we assume that in the brain scans we see something of the person, their identity. The cultural significance of brain scans outside a medical context is hard to fully appreciate as it is constantly growing, but in my work I use them to signpost subjective experience and to reference the fact that neuroscience is constantly challenging our notions of identity. For me they are a visual link with the interior self, the potent soup of brain and consciousness which is central to defining who we are. This is why they are so much part of my work.

Contemporary neuroscience is supported by extraordinary brain imaging techniques (MRI, PET, CT and EEG) so that it is now possible to localize and visualize various forms of activity in the brain. My work responds to, and uses this contemporary imagery, to build up an alternative and more complete picture of someone by referring to the dimensions of self which reside inside the body. With this approach I aim to give insight into identity by blending personal (subjective) and scientific (objective) narratives. I hope to breach the barriers between the philosophical and scientific discourses through images that reveal previously unseen aspects of the self but which, without their individual narratives, have an impersonal quality. I hope my work challenges conventional expectations of portraiture.

- Susan Aldworth

http://www.susanaldworth.com/

Above images: Susan Aldworth, Location Drawing 2005; Brainscape 21, 2006; Elizabeth; Brainscape 5, 2006; Cogito Ergo Sum 3a, 2006. Courtesy the Artist.

Beyond Magic Forest

Our discussions were helpful in aiding Richard Wingate in developing teaching strategies for his students and as well as developing his interest in science and art projects. Since we met, he has served on the selection panel for the Wellcome Trust’s art science grants panel and he has become more interested in teaching pedagogies as we have developed our links. Lots of time in Richard’s office was spent with him making explanatory drawings of the work he was undertaking and specifically sitting it within the physical landscape of the brain.

All the images I produced for Magic Forest except for the skull in the starting part of the work are hand drawn. The skull was photographed in the human anatomy rooms of King’s College, London. The animated drawings were all done in Photoshop. I tried to use Richard’s QuickTime movies but they didn’t give the scope to explore the range of effects I needed nor could they be used to give the slow dissolve effect utilized in the final successful manifestation of Magic Forest. I was fortunate in that as I developed ideas for Magic Forest, 35mm slide projection was being taken over by PowerPoint and data projectors in the world of presentation and I could pick up cheap equipment to experiment very easily and cheaply. I bought voile screens and tested how I could project onto it and in some way replicate the thin slices viewed under the confocal microscope.

The basic concept of Magic Forest followed what I researched — thorough scientific papers and what I saw in the lab; the brain not as a solid fixed piece of hardware that processed our thoughts, but a dynamic changing organ on the move from birth to death. Most importantly this is what I saw in Richard’s lab, but I also saw all this change in the MRC Centre for Synaptic Plasticity in Bristol and in visits to the UCL Centre for Neurology at Queens Square, London.

Before Magic Forest

Before working on Magic Forest I had been making a sequence of photographic works around science issues and scientific samples. Some were taken from life and manipulated others were taken back lit on light boxes. Some of the ‘pseudo’ specimens were painted with gouache before being photographed.

I particularly liked the photographs using bacon from the supermarket like in ‘Twins’ a large dura-transparency, but had to avoid shop security as I riffled through the fridges for the right looking bacon.

The end of Magic Forest

Magic Forest is, I hope, a work of art and not simply science illustration; it is more than this so as with many works of art there is an underlying biographical tone that lies at its center.

There is a sense of a cycle in the work, a starting, a process of growth, its fulfilment and its end to then start around again; it moves from blackness to blackness. The work ends for me as a catastrophic seizure, the death of many brain cells. In the year before I finally made Magic Forest and before it had been shown at the Science Museum London my mother died of a stroke. I have always thought of the work as part homage to her. Her life was full of the botanical world, gardens, trees, forest walks and the outdoors; this had been her preserve. She was trained as a horticulturalist and always enjoyed growing plants. I would sometimes return home and she and my father would be gardening well after the sun had set.

So Magic Forest would very much be a world that she would have enjoyed. Interestingly, too, my father was a geographer, so landscape was something in the air at all times in my childhood; understanding how the terrain was created was an ever present part of growing up. No wonder landscape, transformation, biology, and neuroscience have been part of my life, when I studied science at university, and have crept into my artistic practice when I changed disciplines.

- Andrew Carnie

http://scienceandart–andrew-carnie.blogspot.com/

www.andrewcarnie.co.uk

Above images: Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, Courtesy the artist; one of Richard Wingate’s explanatory devices; Andrew Carnie drawings towards Complex Brain; Tree 1 Lung; Candelabra; Early pieces 10 to the 15 and Twins; Towards the end of Magic Forest, and towards the beginning of Magic Forest.

The Symposium for Landscapes of the Mind has just taken place; unfortunately logistics and money meant I couldn’t be there! I hope it went well. Since I couldn’t be there I thought I would jot down some bits about Magic Forest (2002) that might be pertinent.

First thing is maybe to set it, in place and time and send a few images of the protagonists. By a bit of a contorted journey I eventually met Richard Wingate, my science associate at King’s College London, working in the Medical Research Council Developmental Neurology Department in New Hunt House.

Richard and I often had long discussions in his office near his lab. The conversations were often wide ranging and touched on other interests which were sometimes relevant and sometimes not. Stuff on bikes is not, but a joint interest in early cinema was, especially around early systems of recording movement and projecting it. Eadweard Muybridge (1830 – 1904) and chronphotography was important. Muybridge’s work has echoes of Richard’s stacks of images of his in-vitro growing neurons in the chick brain played as QuickTime Movies. Muybridge was in a sense the father of the motion picture, with the development of the Zoöpraxiscope, and the father of the use of photography to disclose hidden aspects of biological life to. Richard and I also found we had an interest in the wok of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 – 1934), a Spanish histologist, physician, pathologist, and Nobel laureate. 

As a pathologist Cajal was the explorer of the morphology of the brain and as an interested ‘artist’ his drawings of the brain are compulsive viewing for both Richard and myself. The drawings have a real sensitivity and quality of line.

Though it is still quite a few years on since Magic Forest was made we still work together though and have regular contact, but haven’t made a ‘work’ together since we made Complex Brain: Spreading Arbour (2004) a couple of years after Magic Forest. We have tried but our grant applications seem to get turned down!

I have made a number of works since Magic Forest. Lots of these works have been science related and I have become increasingly interested in the incorporation of science and science imagery into our sense of ‘self’ and who we are. Works like Slice (2004) and We Are Where We Are (2006) have developed these issues.

To be continued. . .

- Andrew Carnie

http://scienceandart–andrew-carnie.blogspot.com/

www.andrewcarnie.co.uk

Above images: Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, Courtesy the artist; Andrew Carnie and Richard Wingate; Richard Wingate at the confocal microscope; New Hunt House, King’s College, London; Cajal drawing; Complex Brain: Spreading Arbour (2004); We Are Where We Are (2006).

“Our eyes may see images, but our brains interpret the visual world and generate cognitive and emotional responses to the visual input from the eyes.”

These words written by Curator Katie Price and Psychology Professor Betty Zimmerberg peaked my interest, inspiring me to be an enthusiastic part of this extraordinary show. It is not only the work in Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain that is important but the collaboration of thoughts between disciplines that began in Professor Zimmerberg’s class has continued to bring others in. I am very thankful for all of the professors and students that I have met during my installation and symposium and for their comments and contributions. My participation has brought back many memories of the most powerful and personal aspects of my work and personality.

Before there was A Woman’s Brain there was The Moon. Made out of window screen and straight pins, The Moon hangs out about two feet from the wall and is lit by a theater light that focuses a shadow on the wall. The shadow looks like the cellular patterns of the body.

As a young artist I tried to find a place for sculpture. Like the moon and the ice landscape of Lake Erie in the winter, I imagined sculpture to be in the middle of an appearing and disappearing object. I set out to find subjects that our culture had emotional attachments to but no real knowledge of. Art seemed to reside in the space of the undead, the space between experience and memory, between the space of life and death. To me, the brain is a mysterious planet, with two hemispheres, up there in your head, where you can not reach it or touch it or really know what it does. Like the moon it has strange powers over your body and soul.

My father was a doctor, a cardiovascular surgeon. He was from a generation unafraid to speculate on what might become of the future and he backed up his theories with bizarre and visually detailed information about the body and the minds influence upon it.  To him the body was something to be opened, to be studied, to be cured, marvel at and cherished.

I came from a large family of eight children and as we ate dinner it sometimes seemed that the human body had been laid out for us to examine; first by jokes, managed by table manners and a concern for our growing brains – and then – the silent stare of deep green eyes, reflecting the open heart; closing slowly, then and there, into a sleeping giant.

One day, when I was about 10 or 11 he told me that a woman’s brain would evolve beyond that of a man’s. I asked him why — he said it was because of its structure and flexibility. This made perfect sense since on an episode of Star Trek, “The Trial of Christopher Pike,” there was a planet of only women, with huge brains that could telecommunicate and create illusions for human beings. When I was young, it was common knowledge that we only used 7 or 10 or 15 percent of the brain. I wondered what we did with the rest and imagined that intuition and telecommunication must be part of the unused portion.

In 1994-95, I read the science fiction book Europa by Stanislaw Lem. Europa is a planet that is a brain, orbiting two suns, which causes illusions in the astronauts’ studying it. The planet’s seas are a gelatinous blue, the same as I used for A Woman’s Brain.

A Woman’s Brain (1995) is based upon an article that was published in the NY Times. Using new brain imaging techniques, it showed how a woman’s brain lights up in more places, but that a man’s brain lights up more intensely in one or two places. Doctors Sally and Bennett Shaywitz speculated that women may have an easier time rerouting signals in cases of dyslexia. This article allowed me to figure that my father was right.

I never read well — it took too much time and there were too many words. I liked poetry and plays and in college read the Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles; the classic story that Freud made into a household name. Sophocles says very little about the relationship between Oedipus and his mother and much more about Oedipus and his daughters as they accompany him into exile. Oedipus, in exile, calls himself a “walking tomb” another image of the undead that brought me further into the story. 

As an artist I was aware of the term chiaroscuro; the crossing of light and dark; and in reading poetry became aware of the literary term chiasmus, when two characters cross and their fates become inverted. The crossing of Oedipus’s fate with that of the blind prophet Theiresias is a classic example and follows the neurological crossing of the eye’s nerves into the brain to invert the image you see, not in your eye but in your brain. 

The Oedipal Blind Spot is a map of Oedipus’s journey. It is also that of a head, with two eyes (representing Corinth and Athens), the mouth and ear (representing Thebes) the brain as a reflective blind spot (representing the mountains where he was left as a boy and murdered his father) and the brain of premonition, intuition, and mystery (represented by the carrion birds of Theiresias). In this work, I wanted the viewer’s eye wander and never settle.

In 2004, I began a series of painted heads to represent the sensations, dreams and nightmares inside. I cut one open to weave a brain as a funnel and plane that divide the face from the head.  I suffer from migraines and often feel my head as alien — surrounded by color and light. Recalling the image of Oedipus, the eyeline (blotched and bruised), is a horizon line, a fine opening between the face of expression and the buried secret of the brain.

My Uncle (my father’s brother) was the Hungarian neurobiologist János Szentágothai. I knew him a little and when he would come to visit he brought his watercolors and painted. As a college student I visited him in Hungary in 1984, and he showed me volumes of large books of drawings that he made beginning in the late 1940s and continuing throughout his life. The drawings were abstract images of the brain at a cellular level; the cells were connected by light and dark squiggly lines and he told me how the brain worked. I never understood what he said but from his drawings I could determine that he began with his imagination to establish a theory that would become well know in the future.

Notes of gratitude:

Betty Zimmerberg was kind to give me writings and explain some of my Uncles theories and experiments.

A Woman’s Brain was made while I took part in the PS1 International Studio Program and was first shown at The Angel Orensanz Foundation, NYC in 1995.

The Oedipal Blind Spot was conceived as part of a larger exhibit called Oedipus Rex the Drowned Man at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Catalogue available with text by Lynne Cooke.

I remain grateful to Alanna Heiss, founder of PS1, Susanne Ghez of the Renaissance Society and Lynne Cooke for their early support of my work.

Untitled (Head with Opening) was part of a larger series of works show at David Zwirner in 2006.

- Katy Schimert

Above images: Katy Schimert sewing A Woman’s Brain; fMRI images show the distribution of brain activation patterns in men (left) and women (right) during a nonword rhyming task; Star Trek; A Woman’s Brain; Katy Schimert’s work in the exhibition; Untitled (Head with Opening), 2006, paper, watercolor, and Plastilina. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York; drawing by Hungarian neurobiologist János Szentágothai, Katy Schimert’s uncle; Inside Katy Schimert’s Untitled (Head with Opening), 2006.

The blind spot is a well-known psychological phenomenon that is a direct correlate of an anatomical structure in the eye. The eye communicates with the brain by virtue of the fact that specific neurons in the eye project their axons out of the eye to the brain. Where this bundle of axons exits the eye is called the optic nerve head, and it turns out that the axons themselves actually crowd out the light sensors of eye, the photoreceptors, so that the light that falls onto the optic nerve head during formation of an image is lost. We are literally blind to this spot in the visual world. Unless you are specifically looking for it you don’t even notice it, because the blind spot for the opposite eye is in a different location with respect to the visual world. If you have never found your blind spot before I highly recommend you visit Eric Chudler’s website at the University of Washington(http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chvision.html) showing not only how to find your blind spot, but also to demonstrate that your brain can fill in the missing information even in the absence of information from the other eye. Today I am going to discuss blind spots in a more metaphorical sense in the context of the Oedipal Blind Spot.

While Katy Schimert’s sculpture, Oedipal Blind Spot, is indeed a map of Greece, it is designed to simultaneously represent the visual system, and specifically the connection between the eyes the brain. You can see we are looking down from the top of the head as the left eye is above and the right below. How we see is that the visual input i.e. light emitted or reflected off of the outside world enters the eye and this information is communicated on to the brain through what are called axons. In all vertebrate species, these axons cross each other in what is called the optic chiasm, or chiasmus here, just before entering the brain proper. In animals with frontal eyes, where both eyes are seeing much the same thing, the axons actually intermingle here at the chiasm, and approximately half of the axons from each eye goes to each half of the brain, so you have left eye and right eye inputs intermixed on both the left and right sides of the brain. If you were to take this connectivity literally in the context of this sculpture you would see that they left eye axons are represented by red thread, possibly signifying life or the blood line, and the right eye axons are represented by black thread, signifying death or darkness.

Consistent with this idea, you notice that the red thread begins with Oedipus’ childhood or adoptive home, Corinth, and that the black thread is associated with Athens where his is said to have gone into self-exile and died. You will also note that the pathway to the carrion birds of Theiresias, which represent the brain of intuition and mystery, are not intermixed, as the visual projection would be, but entirely black. Furthermore, the pathway back to Thebes is entirely red, indicative of his tie to his birth parents Laius and Jocasta. This failure of the paths to properly intermingle may be the first indication of the blind spot that governs Oedipus’ tragic life. Oedipus was simply unable to integrate the intuitive, perhaps the riddle of the Oracle, with the concrete, which was the identity of his parents.

This inability to properly integrate information from different modalities seems to us to be somewhat naïve. You might even say, “well Oedipus is a Greek tragedy – that could never happen to me,” but you would be wrong. Integration of information happens at many levels, such that sensory information becomes increasingly processed and therefore sophisticated along the pathway that it travels to the brain. Take for example the relatively simple – and well understood – organization of the visual system. There are several layers of cells in the eye that process the information from the visual world. Light first enters the eye hitting the detector cells, which we call rods and cones. Rods and cones communicate this information to one or more cells in the next layer, which send the information along to one or more cells in the next layer that then project to the brain. In the brain, the retinal axons communicate to one or more cells in a brain structure called the thalumus. The thalamus then sends projections on to the visual cortex, which is in the back of the brain.

This is the first place where information from two eyes begin to converge, as you can see inputs conveying information from both eyes on single neurons in layer IV of the visual cortex. From there, the cells project to cells in different layers of the primary visual cortex and from the visual cortex on to the secondary visual cortex, and from there to other centers. At each step of this pathway the coding of the information becomes increasingly sophisticated. In the eye, a rod or cone only knows one thing: how many photons collided with it. An individual thalamus cell receives the necessary inputs to determine whether there is a light spot on a dark background or a dark spot on a light background at a particular point in space. A cell in the primary visual cortex interprets information about edges or lines, many can even tell if those lines are moving. Beyond that is such sophisticated processing that we don’t even really understand it, but it seems that our encoding is sophisticated enough even that we have individual cells that can interpret whether or not we are seeing a face.

The point of all of this is that every level of processing is an opportunity for error. Some of the best known errors are agnosias, where an individual is unable to recognize or process a particular modality, such as word agnosia experienced by dyslexics or prosopagnosia the inability to recognize faces. Another type of error is synesthesia which should be familiar to anyone who has read Oliver Sack’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In synesthesias, individuals confuse one sensory modality with another such as tasting shapes or associating numbers with colors, which you may have read about in the latest ScientEphic magazine. However, I would like to draw your attention to a completely different sort of misinterpretation of sensory experience and that is of vestibular illusions. Our vestibular sense, or our sense of where we are in space, is conveyed to us through three sensory modalities, proprioception, vision, and sensory input to the inner ear. The advantage of this is that these three modalities can be functionally redundant such that loss of one can be compensated for by the other two. The disadvantage is that any time the input from one of the three disagrees with the input from the others, it can results in vertigo and motion sickness. When the problem is chronic it can be debilitating and even intolerable, and suicide rates among people with chronic vestibular problems is significantly higher than that of the general population. We know quite a lot about vestibular illusions from the experiences of fighter pilots because they fly often in the dark, in the clouds, or in other ways without sufficient direct visual input, and it turns out that vestibular illusions almost exclusively occur in the absence of visual input.

One example is that of the Giant Hand Phenomenon, where a pilot flying a plane begins to very slowly turn in one direction, intentionally or not, which causes the plane to begin to descend because of the reduced lift on the wings. If the turn is of sufficient duration and sufficiently shallow, the sensation (again in the absence of visual input) is one of flying completely level. Because of the overwhelming tendency of the brain to assume the familiar, the pilot sometimes assumes that their instruments are reading incorrectly even if they are not. What is more common is that the pilot recognizes his or her own error and attempts to return the plane to a neutral angle using the control stick. However, in the process of doing so, there is an overwhelming sensation that the attempt to right the plane has resulted, not in righting of the plane, but in banking it in the other direction, which results in the overwhelming reflex to return the plan to its original banked position. Pilots who have experienced this have said that it required an immense effort to try to control the plane because it was as if a giant hand were pressing down on the wing (on the side of the original turn).

There are several other examples of vestibular illusions, but I think this one most nicely illustrates the tension between subconscious and conscious. Even knowing the right answer is not always enough to solve the problem, or in the case of Oedipus, to avoid fulfilling the prediction of the Oracle.

I would like to add here that one of the only ways known to overcome the Giant Hand Phenomenon is for the pilot to let go of the controls of the airplane for a few seconds. When a pilot does so and returns their hands to the controls it is generally much easier to right the ship. When you think about it, the similarity to Oedipus’ condition is striking, given that when he finally discovers his tragic error he relinquishes control of his final days to his daughter Antigone. We have reason to believe that Katy Schimert may identify with Antigone, and this piece may be an attempt to suggest that the resolution of the problems associated with the blind spot may simply be to relinquish control, perhaps to the next generation.

- Lara Hutson, Assistant Professor of Biology

Above images: Katy Schimert’s Oedipal Blind Spot, 1997 (2010); aluminum tape, conte crayon, pastel, graphite, thread, pins. Exhibition copy from the Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland; Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.